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Mon, 30 Mar 2015 16:57:44 +0000http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.1enhourly1Shell cynically blocking action on climate changehttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/shell-cynically-blocking-action-on-climate-change/
http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/shell-cynically-blocking-action-on-climate-change/#commentsMon, 30 Mar 2015 16:57:44 +0000mhailehttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/?p=4945Shell and its oil and gas peers are narcissistic, paranoid and psychopathic, and engaged in a cynical attempt to block action on global warming, according to the UK’s former climate change envoy.

In an open letter to Shell chief executive Ben van Beurden, John Ashton said the company’s promised transformation in response to climate change is in reality “a manifesto for the oil and gas status quo”. The companies justified their strategy, he said, with the unsupported claim that the economic and moral benefits of providing cheap energy to the world’s poor exceeds the risks to the same people from climate change.

Ashton, an independent commentator and until 2012 the UK’s top climate diplomat, wrote the letter, published in the Guardian, in response to a speech by van Beurden in February. The Shell CEO said those calling for “fossil fuels out, renewables in” were naive and said provoking a sudden death of fossil fuels was not a plausible plan to tackle global warming.

Ashton said van Beurden’s speech “was a classic of obfuscation and dissimulation.”

Ashton said: “It is their right to say whatever they want, but it is essential that this prospectus be challenged. Underpinning [the oil and gas industry’s response to climate change] is a cynical calculation that it will be politically impossible to mobilise a truly transformational response, together with an equally cynical attempt to make this self-fulfilling.” Shell declined to comment.

In the letter, Ashton wrote: “You and your peers cannot complain if society increasingly comes to see in your behaviour the characteristic marks of the professional narcissist, paranoiac, and psychopath.”

He said Shell was narcissistic because it was so intoxicated by the current energy system it had helped to build that it could not contemplate the need to build a new one: “You could accept squarely that the days of yesterday’s business model are numbered, that the challenge now is to manage its decline and build alongside it a new business fit for today.”

“The paranoiac fears conspiracies that do not exist,” Ashton wrote. “You fear a non-existent conspiracy to bring about your sudden death.” While current fossil fuel reserves are several times greater than can be burned while avoiding catastrophic climate change, all experts acknowledge that coal, oil and gas will need to be phased out over the next few decades.

“The psychopath displays inflated self-appraisal, lack of empathy, and a tendency to squash those who block the way,” Ashton told van Beurden. “All these traits can be found in your [speech].”

Ashton cites the fast-growing and UN-backed divestment campaign, which has persuaded over 180 organisations to sell off their investments in fossil fuel companies, as a threat to Shell. “The divestment movement may still be small but it is rallying young people, has moral authority, and can now make a prudential case as well as an environmental one,” he writes.

Divestment campaigners argue that the business models of fossil fuel companies, which continue to spend billions on searching for new reserves, are endangering the climate. They also argue those reserves would become worthless if the world’s governments keep their word to cut emissions and limit climate change to 2C.

The Guardian’s Keep it in the Ground campaign is asking the world’s two biggest health charities – the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust – to divest.

In the final section of the letter, Ashton issues a challenge to van Beurden and Shell: “Stop frustrating ambition. Talk to us about how you will play your part in a [clean energy] transition. Tell us the inspirational story of that transition, backed by your knowledge and experience … And don’t tell us through crocodile tears that this will all take a long time. Tell us what you will do to hasten it.”

Ashton adds: “Stop pretending that gas is part of the answer to climate change, rather than a necessary stage in a transition to be kept as short as possible. Urge your peers to turn their backs on new fracking around the world, as you wisely have in the UK.

“It’s a high-carbon sugar rush and a recipe for political grief. Stop grumbling about renewables and unlock the opportunities they offer. Manage a retreat from the carbon frontiers, especially the Arctic [and] press the accelerator on carbon capture and storage.”

]]>http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/shell-cynically-blocking-action-on-climate-change/feed/0Amazon Forest Becoming Less of a Climate Change Safety Nethttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/amazon-forest-becoming-less-of-a-climate-change-safety-net/
http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/amazon-forest-becoming-less-of-a-climate-change-safety-net/#commentsMon, 23 Mar 2015 16:21:58 +0000mhailehttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/?p=4937The ability of the Amazon forest to soak up excess carbon dioxide is weakening over time, researchers reported last week. That finding suggests that limiting climate change could be more difficult than expected.

For decades, Earth’s forests and seas have been soaking up roughly half of the carbon pollution that people are pumping into the atmosphere. That has limited the planetary warming that would otherwise result from those emissions.

The forests and oceans have largely kept up even as emissions have skyrocketed. That surprised many scientists, but also prompted warnings that such a robust “carbon sink” could not be counted on to last forever.

In a vast study spanning 30 years and covering 189,000 trees distributed across 321 plots in the Amazon basin, researchers led by a group at the University of Leeds, in Britain, reported that the uptake of carbon dioxide in the Amazon peaked in the 1990s, at about 2 billion tons a year, and has since fallen by half.

Initially, the researchers postulated, the Amazon may have responded well to rising carbon dioxide levels, which are known to increase plant growth, but that response appears to be tapering off. Drought and other stresses could be playing a role, but the main factor seems to be that the initial acceleration of growth sped up the metabolism of the trees.

“With time, the growth stimulation feeds through the system, causing trees to live faster, and so die younger,” Oliver L. Phillips, a tropical ecologist at the University of Leeds and one of the leaders of the research, said in a statement.

Further research is needed, but the scientists say that climate forecasting models that assume a continuing, robust carbon sink in the Amazon could be overly optimistic.

At a global scale, studies suggest that forests are still absorbing far more carbon than they release into the atmosphere, even as stresses like fires and beetle attacks increase because of climate change. In essence, rising forces of growth have been outracing rising forces of death in the world’s forests.

Perhaps the big question now is whether that will flip. Will forests beyond the Amazon, such as the boreal forest that encircles the Northern Hemisphere, eventually follow the Amazon and weaken as carbon sinks?

That would mean, in effect, that human civilization would have less help from trees, and cuts in carbon emissions would need to be sharper than previously thought to limit global warming to tolerable levels.

“Forests are doing us a huge favor, but we can’t rely on them to solve the carbon problem,” Dr. Phillips said. “Instead, deeper cuts in emissions will be required to stabilize our climate.”

By curtailing pollution within the U.S. government, Obama sought to increase political pressure on other nations to deal seriously with climate change. The U.S. and other nations will soon announce how much they’re willing to cut their national emissions as part of a global climate treaty to be finalized in December; scientists warn that if those pledges are too lax, the treaty could be too weak to stop the worst effects of global warming.

“We thought it was important for us to lead by example,” Obama said at the Energy Department headquarters, where he toured a sprawling installation of solar panels on the building’s roof. “These are ambitious goals, but we know they’re achievable goals.”

Under an executive order signed by Obama, the government must cut its emissions of the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming by 40 percent, compared to 2008 levels — a move the White House said could save taxpayers up to $18 billion in electricity costs. Obama also directed agencies to ramp up use of renewable energy so that within a decade, roughly one-third of the government’s power consumption will come from sources like solar, wind and hydropower.

Yet it was unclear how the government would meet those targets. The White House said it was providing agencies with new tools to track their progress and “sustainability plans,” but offered no specifics.

Already, Obama’s administration has gone after most of the major sources of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, including cars and trucks, power plants, methane from natural gas production and refrigerants. The administration was also expected to release new rules for “fracking” — hydraulic fracturing for gas or oil — on public lands as early as Friday.

Most of those regulations have faced intense opposition from the energy industry and from Republicans — including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who wrote the nation’s 50 governors on Thursday urging them to defy Obama’s power plant rules by refusing to submit compliance plans to Washington. In contrast, Obama’s order cutting emissions within the government elicited no immediate criticism.

Although the government is the largest U.S. energy consumer, it’s responsible for less than 1 percent of annual U.S. emissions — and a far smaller chunk of emissions worldwide. Still, the Obama administration was betting that aggressive federal cuts would spur private industry and other nations to follow suit.

“The truth is the U.S. has only a few additional levers they can pull to reduce emissions,” said Paul Bledsoe, a climate adviser in the Clinton White House. “One of those is the federal government’s own emission profile.”

Major companies that sell to the federal government like GE, HP, Northrop Grumman and Honeywell also announced voluntary commitments to cut their own emissions of the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming. IBM, for example, said it will cut its energy consumption 35 percent by 2020 and buy at least 20 percent of its power from renewably sources by that year.

All told, the government pollution cuts along with industry contributions will have the effect of keeping 26 million metric tons of greenhouse gases out of the air by 2025, or the equivalent of what about 5.5 million cars would pump out through their tailpipes in an average year, the White House said.

The global climate treaty, in the works for years, is supposed to be concluded in December in Paris, but most countries will miss the end-of-March deadline to announce their national contributions. One prominent exception: the European Union, which earlier in March vowed to cut emissions at least 40 percent by 2030, compared to 1990.

The U.S. has yet to announce its contribution to the treaty. But in a bid to build momentum, last year Obama set a U.S. goal to cut emissions up to 28 percent by 2025 — compared to 2005 levels — in a joint announcement with China that boosted hopes for an aggressive global pact.

“Certainly our hope is that we are laying forth template that other countries could also learn from and look at as well,” said Brian Deese, a senior adviser to Obama.

Under Obama’s executive order, the government must:

— Cut energy use in federal buildings 2.5 percent every year through 2025.

— Reduce the amount of water used in federal buildings 2 percent every year through 2025.

— Ensure federal agencies get 25 percent of their energy — both heat and electricity — from clean sources by 2025.

— Put more hybrid and zero-emission vehicles in the federal fleet.

]]>http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/obama-drives-ahead-with-government-emissions-cuts/feed/0Climate change in the Arctic is messing with our weatherhttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/climate-change-in-the-arctic-is-messing-with-our-weather/
http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/climate-change-in-the-arctic-is-messing-with-our-weather/#commentsMon, 16 Mar 2015 16:04:22 +0000mhailehttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/?p=4935There has been a lot of attention on the influence of rapid warming of the Arctic on weather in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes. Much of the work has focused on changes to the Jetstream amplitudes and association of these changes to ice loss in the Arctic.

We know that the Arctic is heating faster than the planet as a whole. Consequently, there is more energy in the Arctic which can be transmitted to the atmosphere. Much of the excess heat is transferred to the atmosphere in the late fall or early winter. This extra energy is connected to what’s called Arctic geopotential height, which has increased during the same times of the year. As a consequence, the Jetstream might weaken in the cold seasons.

But what about summer? Have these changes been detected then too? Well just recently, a paper was published in that answered this question. The authors, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and from the University of Potsdam reported on three measures of atmospheric dynamics (1) zonal winds, (2) eddy kinetic energy, and (3) amplitude of the fast-moving Rossby waves. Rossby waves are very large waves in the upper atmospheric winds. They are important because of their large influence on weather.

The authors found that the summer zonal winds have weakened. The reason for the weakening is that since the Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, the temperature difference between the Arctic and the lower latitudes is getting smaller. It is this temperature difference which maintains the wind speeds. The authors also found that eddy kinetic energy is decreasing.

So what does all this mean? Well two things. First, it means that there are either fewer or less intense summer storms or a combination of both. But secondly, it means that weather patterns can get “stuck”. Storms are excellent at breaking up persistent weather patterns, and bringing cool and moist air from ocean regions to land zones. With fewer storms, “warm weather conditions endure, resulting in buildup of heat and drought.”

The authors looked to the future to inquire about how things would continue to change. They find that continued global warming will increase the risk of heat waves. We all know that the warming temperature will make heat waves more likely. But added to this, “stickiness” of weather patterns will play a big role as well.

Whether it is the heat wave in Europe of 2003, the Russian heat wave of 2010, the heat waves in the USA in 2011 or 2012, or last year’s (and still continuing heat in California), these events have economic and human consequences. It is crucial to understand how our current climate works if we have any hope in predicting what will happen in the future. This study makes a great contribution to putting the puzzle of the Earth’s climate together.

I asked colleague Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf about this work and he said,

“I think the idea that the mid-latitude winds, especially the jet stream, may be changing in response to Arctic warming has proven to be a highly fruitful one. Now that scientists have started to analyze the available wind data in a systematic way, very interesting patterns emerge that also make physical sense.

It is increasingly clear that global warming does not just mean global warming in a narrow sense. Our planet is not simply getting warmer – rather this warming comes with real changes to the workings of the atmosphere and the oceans.”

But President Baldwin Lonsdale says the havoc created in recent days by Cyclone Pam is not entirely natural.

Emissions of CO2, he said, are partly responsible.

“We see the level of sea rise… The cyclone seasons, the warm, the rain, all this is affected,” he said.

“This year we have more than in any year. Yes, climate change is contributing to this.”

But is he right?

It is an irony that President Lonsdale escaped Cyclone Pam because he was in Japan – at a conference on Disaster Risk Reduction.

He heard there that his capital Port Vila is the most vulnerable city in the world to natural disasters.

Globally, temperature has risen by 0.8C, mainly due to greenhouse gases. And that is affecting weather around the world.

But attributing individual tropical storms directly to our planes, cars and factories is a different matter.

The world authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, found no evidence of a link between the frequency of tropical storms and climate change.

The effect of climate change on precipitation is poorly understood.

But, on the other hand, scientists point out that, as the climate warms, the air can hold more moisture and more energy.

Therefore, storms – theoretically – have more potential for destruction.

They are much more confident about the influence of climate change on temperature extremes.

The Australian heatwave of 2013 would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of CO2 emissions, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

And there is an undisputed link between emissions and rising sea levels, which leaves poor low-lying Vanuatu increasingly vulnerable.

So when a storm strikes the islands in the year that heads of governments have promised to sign an over-arching deal to protect the climate, the president’s remarks are understandable.

He can’t be sure that the gusts of Pam were propelled by human hands.

But he can be very sure that, as greenhouse gases increase, it is his people who are among the most at risk.

]]>http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/did-climate-change-cause-vanuatu-damage/feed/0Keep fossil fuels in the ground to stop climate changehttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/keep-fossil-fuels-in-the-ground-to-stop-climate-change/
http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/keep-fossil-fuels-in-the-ground-to-stop-climate-change/#commentsWed, 11 Mar 2015 16:26:27 +0000mhailehttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/?p=4929f you visit the website of the UN body that oversees the world’s climate negotiations, you will find dozens of pictures, taken across 20 years, of people clapping. These photos should be of interest to anthropologists and psychologists. For they show hundreds of intelligent, educated, well-paid and elegantly-dressed people wasting their lives.

The celebratory nature of the images testifies to the world of make-believe these people inhabit. They are surrounded by objectives, principles, commitments, instruments and protocols, which create a reassuring phantasm of progress while the ship on which they travel slowly founders. Leafing through these photos, I imagine I can almost hear what the delegates are saying through their expensive dentistry. “Darling you’ve re-arranged the deckchairs beautifully. It’s a breakthrough! We’ll have to invent a mechanism for holding them in place, as the deck has developed a bit of a tilt, but we’ll do that at the next conference.”

This process is futile because they have addressed the problem only from one end, and it happens to be the wrong end. They have sought to prevent climate breakdown by limiting the amount of greenhouse gases that are released; in other words, by constraining the consumption of fossil fuels. But, throughout the 23 years since the world’s governments decided to begin this process, the delegates have uttered not one coherent word about constraining production.

Compare this to any other treaty-making process. Imagine, for example, that the Biological Weapons Convention made no attempt to restrain the production or possession of weaponised smallpox and anthrax, but only to prohibit their use. How effective do you reckon it would be? (You don’t have to guess: look at the US gun laws, which prohibit the lethal use of guns but not their sale and carriage. You can see the results on the news every week.) Imagine trying to protect elephants and rhinos only by banning the purchase of their tusks and horns, without limiting killing, export or sale. Imagine trying to bring slavery to an end not by stopping the transatlantic trade, but by seeking only to discourage people from buying slaves once they had arrived in the Americas. If you want to discourage a harmful trade, you must address it at both ends: production and consumption. Of the two, production is the most important.

The extraction of fossil fuels is a hard fact. The rules governments have developed to prevent their use are weak, inconsistent and negotiable. In other words, when coal, oil and gas are produced, they will be used. Continued production will overwhelm attempts to restrict consumption. Even if efforts to restrict consumption temporarily succeed, they are likely to be self-defeating. A reduction in demand when supply is unconstrained lowers the price, favouring carbon-intensive industry.

You can search through the UN’s website for any recognition of this issue, but you would be wasting your time. In its gushing catalogue of self-congratulation, at Kyoto, Doha, Bali, Copenhagen, Cancún, Durban, Lima and all stops en route, the phrase “fossil fuel” does not occur once. Nor do the words coal or oil. But gas: oh yes, there are plenty of mentions of gas. Not natural gas, of course, but of greenhouse gases, the sole topic of official interest.

The closest any of the 20 international conferences convened so far have come to acknowledging the problem is in the resolution adopted in Lima in December last year. It pledged “cooperation” in “the phasing down of high-carbon investments and fossil fuel subsidies”, but proposed no budget, timetable or any instrument or mechanism required to make it happen. It’s progress of a sort, I suppose, and perhaps, after just 23 years, we should be grateful.

There is nothing random about the pattern of silence that surrounds our lives. Silences occur where powerful interests are at risk of exposure. They protect these interests from democratic scrutiny. I’m not suggesting that the negotiators decided not to talk about fossil fuels, or signed a common accord to waste their lives. Far from it: they have gone to great lengths to invest their efforts with the appearance of meaning and purpose. Creating a silence requires only an instinct for avoiding conflict. It is a conditioned and unconscious reflex; part of the package of social skills that secures our survival. Don’t name the Devil for fear that you’ll summon him.

Breaking such silences requires a conscious and painful effort. I remember as if it were yesterday how I felt when I first raised this issue in the media. I had been working with a group of young activists in Wales, campaigning against opencast coal mines. Talking it over with them, it seemed so obvious, so overwhelming, that I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t on everyone’s lips. Before writing about it, I circled the topic like a dog investigating a suspicious carcass. Why, I wondered, is no one touching this? Is it toxic?

Ice sculptures in the shape of humans are placed on the steps of the music hall in Gendarmenmarkt public square in Berlin September 2, 2009. Hosted by the German World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), 1,000 ice sculptures made by Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo were positioned on the steps in the German capital at noon, to highlight climate change in the arctic region.

You cannot solve a problem without naming it. The absence of official recognition of the role of fossil fuel production in causing climate change – blitheringly obvious as it is – permits governments to pursue directly contradictory policies. While almost all governments claim to support the aim of preventing more than 2C of global warming, they also seek to “maximise economic recovery” of their fossil fuel reserves. (Then they cross their fingers, walk three times widdershins around the office and pray that no one burns it.) But few governments go as far as the UK has gone.

In the Infrastructure Act that received royal assent last month, maximising the economic recovery of petroleum from the UK’s continental shelf became a statutory duty. Future governments are now legally bound to squeeze every possible drop out of the ground.

The idea came from a government review conducted by Sir Ian Wood, the billionaire owner of an inherited company – the Wood Group – that provides services to the oil and gas industry. While Sir Ian says his recommendations “received overwhelming industry support”, his team interviewed no one outside either the oil business or government. It contains no sign that I can detect of any feedback from environment groups or scientists.

His review demanded government powers to enhance both the exploration of new reserves and the exploitation of existing ones. This, it insisted, “will help take us closer to the 24bn [barrel] prize potentially still to come”. The government promised to implement his recommendations in full and without delay. In fact it went some way beyond them. It is prepared to be ruthlessly interventionist when promoting climate change, but not when restraining it.

During December’s climate talks in Lima, the UK’s energy secretary, Ed Davey, did something unwise. He broke the silence. He warned that if climate change policies meant that fossil fuel reserves could no longer be exploited, pension funds could be investing in “the sub-prime assets of the future”. Echoing the Bank of England and financial analysts such as the Carbon Tracker Initiative, Davey suggested that if governments were serious about preventing climate breakdown, fossil fuel could become a stranded asset.

This provoked a furious response from the industry. The head of Oil and Gas UK Malcolm Webb wrote to express his confusion, pointing out that Davey’s statements came “at a time when you, your Department and the Treasury are putting great effort into [making] the UK North Sea more attractive to investors in oil and gas, not less. I’m intrigued to understand how such opposing viewpoints can be reconciled.” He’s not the only one. Ed Davey quickly explained that his comments were not to be taken seriously, as “I did not offer any suggestions on what investors should choose to do.”

Barack Obama has the same problem. During a television interview last year, he confessed that “We’re not going to be able to burn it all.” So why, he was asked, has his government been encouraging ever more exploration and extraction of fossil fuels? His administration has opened up marine oil exploration from Florida to Delaware – in waters that were formally off-limits. It has increased the number of leases sold for drilling on federal lands and, most incongruously, rushed through the process that might, by the end of this month, enable Shell to prospect in the highly vulnerable Arctic waters of the Chukchi Sea.

Similar contradictions beset most governments with environmental pretensions. Norway, for example, intends to be “carbon neutral” by 2030. Perhaps it hopes to export its entire oil and gas output, while relying on wind farms at home. A motion put to the Norwegian parliament last year to halt new drilling because it is incompatible with Norway’s climate change policies was defeated by 95 votes to three.

Ice sculptures in the shape of humans are placed on the steps of the music hall in Gendarmenmarkt public square in Berlin September 2, 2009. Hosted by the German World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), 1,000 ice sculptures made by Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo were positioned on the steps in the German capital at noon, to highlight climate change in the arctic region.

Obama explained that “I don’t always lead with the climate change issue because if you, right now, are worried about whether you’ve got a job or if you can pay the bills, the first thing you want to hear is how do I meet the immediate problem?”

Money is certainly a problem, but not necessarily for the reasons Obama suggested. The bigger issue is the bankrolling of politics by big oil and big coal, and the tremendous lobbying power they purchase. These companies have, in the past, financed wars to protect their position; they will not surrender the bulk of their reserves without a monumental fight. This fight would test the very limits of state power; I wonder whether our nominal democracies would survive it. Fossil fuel companies have become glutted on silence: their power has grown as a result of numberless failures to challenge and expose them. It’s no wonder that the manicured negotiators at the UN conferences, so careful never to break a nail, have spent so long avoiding the issue.

I believe there are ways of resolving this problem, ways that might recruit other powerful interests against these corporations. For example, a global auction in pollution permits would mean that governments had to regulate just a few thousand oil refineries, coal washeries, gas pipelines and cement and fertiliser factories, rather than the activities of seven billion people. It would create a fund from the sale of permits that’s likely to run into trillions: money that could be used for anything from renewable energy to healthcare. By reducing fluctuations in the supply of energy, it would deliver more predictable prices, that many businesses would welcome. Most importantly, unlike the current framework for negotiations, it could work, producing a real possibility of averting climate breakdown.

Left to themselves, the negotiators will continue to avoid this issue until they have wasted everyone else’s lives as well as their own. They keep telling us that the conference in Paris in December is the make or break meeting (presumably they intend to unveil a radical new deckchair design). We should take them at their word, and demand that they start confronting the real problem.

With the help of George Marshall at the Climate Outreach and Information Network, I’ve drafted a paragraph of the kind that the Paris agreement should contain. It’s far from perfect, and I would love to see other people refining it. But, I hope, it’s a start:

“Scientific assessments of the carbon contained in existing fossil fuel reserves suggest that full exploitation of these reserves is incompatible with the agreed target of no more than 2C of global warming. The unrestricted extraction of these reserves undermines attempts to limit greenhouse gas emissions. We will start negotiating a global budget for the extraction of fossil fuels from existing reserves, as well as a date for a moratorium on the exploration and development of new reserves. In line with the quantification of the fossil carbon that can be extracted without a high chance of exceeding 2C of global warming, we will develop a timetable for annual reductions towards that budget. We will develop mechanisms for allocating production within this budget and for enforcement and monitoring.”

If something of that kind were to emerge from Paris, it will not have been a total waste of time, and the delegates would be able to congratulate themselves on a real achievement rather than yet another false one. Then, for once, they would deserve their own applause.

]]>http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/keep-fossil-fuels-in-the-ground-to-stop-climate-change/feed/0California’s hot, dry winters tied to climate changehttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/california%e2%80%99s-hot-dry-winters-tied-to-climate-change/
http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/california%e2%80%99s-hot-dry-winters-tied-to-climate-change/#commentsMon, 09 Mar 2015 16:47:27 +0000mhailehttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/?p=4927Climate change is one of the most prominent public health issues currently on the CDC’s radar. The organization’s Climate and Health Program attempts to help state and city health departments to prepare for the health impacts of climate change, which can come in the form of things like temperature extremes, air pollution, allergens, and changes in disease patterns; they can also be felt indirectly through issues like food security.

Are we seeing some of these effects already? Since 2012, California has been in the midst of a record-setting drought, with extremely warm and dry conditions characterizing the last three years in that state. A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that warming caused by humans is responsible for the conditions that have led to this California drought.

This study, published by scientists affiliated with the Department of Environmental Earth System Science and the Woods Institute for Environment at Stanford University, used historical statewide data for observed temperature, precipitation, and drought in California. The investigators used the Palmer Hydrological Drought Index (PHDI) and the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), collected by the National Climatic Data Center, as measures of the severity of wet/dry anomalies. They also used global climate model simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) to compare historical predictions for anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic historical climates.

The authors performed their analysis using an approach called bootstrapping. Bootstrapping techniques allow statisticians to utilize the same sample repeatedly to improve their estimates of specific effects. In this analysis, bootstrapping was used to compare the climate data with measures of populations from different time periods to allow for analysis of how changes in population are associated with different climate conditions.

This analysis found that the statewide warming in California occurs in climate models that include both natural and human factors, but not in simulations that only include natural factors. It’s a difference with a very high (0.001) level of statistical significance.

In their discussion and conclusions, the investigators state that their results strongly suggest that anthropogenic (human-caused) warming has increased the probability of co-occurring temperature and precipitation conditions that have historically led to California’s droughts. They also state that continued global warming is likely to lead to situations where every future dry period, whether it’s seasonal, annual, or multiannual, will be accompanied by historically warm conditions.

This projected increase in dry/warm conditions may have serious impacts on human and natural systems. The authors posit that high temperatures during spring and autumn could deplete stores of snowpack and increase wildfire risk, severely affecting the state’s ecology. They also hypothesize that increased dry periods will increase the risk of water shortages for humans and ecological systems and even raise the threat of species extinction due to drought.

This is one of a number of studies to have looked at California’s drought, and they’re coming to similar conclusions: historically it’s not unusual for the state to have either warm or dry winters, but the recent drought is notable for having both at once. Figuring out precisely how likely that is, and how it relates to human emissions, is still an area of ongoing research. But as this study makes clear, the residents of the Golden State, human and otherwise, should be prepared for this to be a recurring problem.

]]>http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/california%e2%80%99s-hot-dry-winters-tied-to-climate-change/feed/0How climate change helps fuel California droughthttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/how-climate-change-helps-fuel-california-drought/
http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/how-climate-change-helps-fuel-california-drought/#commentsWed, 04 Mar 2015 21:24:33 +0000mhailehttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/?p=4925Climate change is increasing the risk of severe drought in California by causing warm periods and dry periods to overlap more often, according to a new study.

Rising temperatures resulting from increased greenhouse gas emissions mean warm and dry periods are coinciding more frequently, the study authors say. And that is amplifying the effects of low precipitation.

“The key for drought stress is not just how much precipitation there is,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, the paper’s lead author and an associate professor at Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences. “Temperature is an important influence on the water available in California.”

So Diffenbaugh and two other Stanford researchers analyzed historical climate data for the state to see when warm years coincided with dry years. They found that warm-dry years have occurred more than twice as often in the last two decades than they did in the preceding century.

And it appears that the situation is set to get worse. A continuing rise in global temperatures — fueled in part by human activity — will greatly increase the chances that dry periods are accompanied by warm conditions, the team predicted. That’s what has happened during the state’s current drought, now entering its fourth year and by some measures the worst on record.

“Our results highlight the fact that efforts to understand drought without examining the role of temperature miss a critical contributor to drought risk,” wrote the authors, whose work was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Whether climate change – whatever its cause – has played a role in the California drought is a matter of debate. A report published last fall by the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society concluded that there is no definitive link.

That report included the work of 20 research teams that explored the causes of 16 extreme weather events recorded around the world in 2013. Diffenbaugh and Stanford graduate student Daniel Swain, a co-author of the PNAS study, contributed a paper that said the type of stubborn high-pressure system that persistently pushed storms north of the state is more likely to occur with climate change, suggesting a link to global warming.

But other scientists who contributed to the meteorological society report disagreed, attributing the drought to natural variability. They wrote there was “no appreciable long-term change in the risk for dry climate extremes over California since the late 19th century.”

In the PNAS study, Diffenbaugh, Swain and Stanford graduate student Danielle Touma note that California’s average precipitation has not appreciably declined over the last century. Indeed, climate models suggest that winter precipitation in much of the state could modestly increase this century.

“The emergence of a condition in which there is ~100% probability of an extremely warm year substantially increases the risk of prolonged drought conditions in the region,” they concluded. “Our results strongly suggest that global warming is already increasing the probability of conditions that have historically created high-impact drought in California.”

]]>http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/how-climate-change-helps-fuel-california-drought/feed/0How Climate Change Will Affect NYC’s Skylinehttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/how-climate-change-will-affect-nycs-skyline/
http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/how-climate-change-will-affect-nycs-skyline/#commentsTue, 03 Mar 2015 23:10:31 +0000mhailehttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/?p=4923LAST WEEK, THE New York City Panel on Climate Change released a new report detailing exactly how climate scientists expect New York City to change over over the next 100 years, focusing on projected increases in temperature and sea level. Sea level rise will certainly transform the shape of the city’s coastline. But Manhattan’s edges are basically a man-made pile of garbage already—they can go ahead and disintegrate. What climate will really change is the true shape of New York: Its iconic skyline, and the buildings in it.

New York has a head start on adapting its buildings to its flooded future. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the city made zoning changes to support elevating homes, and mandated that new construction and substantial alterations meet the newest flood maps. “Flooding issues were felt most strongly after Sandy,” says Russell Unger, president of the Urban Green Council. “There was a vigorous response to adapt the building and zoning codes.”

But those changes won’t be nearly enough. Last week’s report estimates that average annual rainfall in New York City will increase between 5 and 13 percent by the 2080s. Sea levels could be as high as six feet by 2100, doubling the area of the city currently at risk for severe flooding. And that’s without taking into account results published this week in Nature that found coastal sea level north of New York City had jumped temporarily by more than five inches between 2009-2010—an extreme, unprecedented event scientists partially blame on climate change.

That means that New Yorkers will first have to radically reinterpret how they use their basements and ground floors. Building owners in flood zones will be responsible for raising habitable spaces up; the city’s Office of Recovery plans to keep ground floors least 2 feet above projected sea level. One way to do that: Abandon all pretense of actually living on the ground floor. Alex Wilson, president of the Resilient Design Institute, advocates for clearing out ground floors and basements in buildings that are at-risk for frequent flooding, and adapting them to let water move in and drain out with minimal damage. “It’s a big challenge if they need to renovate those spaces so they can be flooded,” says Wilson. “That means losing those apartments, moving equipment like boilers to higher floors, and most of all making sure residents have some place to go.”

Buildings will also have to adapt to rising temperatures. New York is going to get much hotter, with average temperatures increasing by as much as 8.8 degrees Fahrenheit by the the 2080s. And the number of heat waves per year will likely triple from two to six. The city’s report emphasizes programs like NYC Cool Roofs, which will coat buildings with reflective paint to keep them cooler. New York City already has strict regulations for providing heating to housing—and thank goodness, with this winter being what it is—but it will have to adapt its codes to be similarly tough on extremely high temperatures. Wilson wants to see building codes modified to ensure operable windows can provide proper ventilation when air conditioning isn’t an option, and Unger wants a plan to deal with large-scale power outages during the height of summer.

Back to that garbage pile of a shoreline: It’ll see massive changes too, of course. The city’s report calls for protections that will change the silhouette of New York City’s ports and beaches, adding 4.15 million cubic yards of sand to Staten Island and city beaches (that’s almost 140,000 dumpsters full), and upgrading flood protection systems in the Lower East Side, Red Hook, and other vulnerable areas.

In the end, though, each of those adjustments is just a bandaid. It’s new construction that will change the city most prominently, including a massive U-shaped buttress, designed by architect Bjarke Ingels, that will wrap around the lower tip of Manhattan to protect it from the rising tides. That’s a dramatic example, but it’s a telling one: Going forward, the design and location of every building in New York will be impacted by climate change. Soon, building insurance rates—currently based on FEMA’s 100-year and 500-year Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRMs)—will incorporate sea level rise analysis, increasing the cost of new construction in flood zones. According to Andrew Martin, a spokesperson at FEMA, pilot studies in San Francisco, Puerto Rico, and two Florida counties are already looking to incorporate sea level rise into the FIRMs. New York won’t be far behind.

Don’t expect New York to transform itself quickly—the city’s report is full of vague directives and almost barren of strict deadlines. “These things can’t change overnight,” says the Urban Green Council’s Unger. But they’ll have to, soon, if the city wants to make it to the next century. And even with a new coastline and a new skyline, New York will always be New York.

]]>http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/how-climate-change-will-affect-nycs-skyline/feed/0Democrats instigate funding probe, get pushbackhttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/democrats-instigate-funding-probe-get-pushback/
http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/news/democrats-instigate-funding-probe-get-pushback/#commentsMon, 02 Mar 2015 16:46:31 +0000mhailehttp://www.stopglobalwarming.org/?p=4921Several members of Congress have begun sending letters to universities, energy companies and trade associations, seeking information about funding to scientists who have been critical of climate change.
Critics have been quick to label the effort a “witch hunt,” but those responsible say the outreach is a logical response to revelations that one of the country’s leading climate skeptics had been receiving funding from major players in the energy industry.

Over the weekend, activist group Greenpeace published documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request that showed ExxonMobil, Southern Company and others had funneled more than $1 million to Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, for research papers and congressional testimony described as “deliverables.”

Soon, who is a research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, obliged by publishing several papers in science journals questioning widely held views on climate change. Journals require scientists to disclose all financial conflicts of interest.

Letters were sent to 100 companies and organizations signed by Sens. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., while additional letters were mailed to universities signed by Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, D-Ariz.

“My colleagues and I cannot perform our duties if research or testimony provided to us is influenced by undisclosed financial relationships,” Grijalva wrote in his letter.

Some of the letters were addressed directly to prominent climate science critics, including University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke, Jr.

Pielke wrote a blog post Wednesday, titled “I am Under ‘Investigation,” denouncing the efforts of Grijalva and affirming that he has not ever received funding from any fossil fuel companies or representatives.

“Rep. Grijalva knows this too, because when I have testified before the U.S. Congress, I have disclosed my funding and possible conflicts of interest,” Pielke wrote. “So I know with complete certainty that this investigation is a politically motivated ‘witch hunt’ designed to intimidate me (and others) and to smear my name.”

Boxer and her colleagues insist their efforts aren’t about intimidation, only about rooting out hidden corporate interests in public discourse.

“We’ve known for many years that the tobacco industry supported phony science claiming that smoking does not cause cancer. Now it’s time for the fossil fuel industry to come clean about funding climate change deniers,” Boxer said in a press release.

The last time such an inquiry took place it was led by Republicans, and the targets were a number of prominent climate scientists whose work has lent credence to man-made climate change — a concept that has convinced the vast majority of scientists.

“It does come across as sort of heavy-handed and overly aggressive,” researcher Michael Mann, a Penn State climate scientist and subject of Republican-led probes, told National Journal.

But Mann said that disclosing funding is something no scientists should have a problem with, and is markedly different in tone and substance to the requests he was subject to.

“The difference being that they were demanding materials that are protected under principles of academic freedom — private deliberations between academics or scientists, unpublished manuscripts, raw source code that was written, stuff that’s intrinsic to your work as a scientist,” Mann said.